Entries for October 2014 | The New York Review of Books

Escape from Microsoft Word by Edward Mendelson | The New York Review of Books
▻http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/oct/21/escape-microsoft-word

Edward #Mendelson on the “#Platonic idea” underlying #Microsoft_Word and how it shapes our thinking

This post is about word processors, but I got the idea for it from something W. H. Auden once said about political philosophers. In 1947, talking with his learned young secretary about an anthology he was compiling, The Portable Greek Reader, he mentioned Isocrates, a Greek orator whose simple-seeming ideas about relations between rich and poor cities were sane and practical. Naïve-sounding Isocrates had solved problems for which Plato’s grand theories had no answer. “Isocrates reminds me of John Dewey,” Auden said. “He’s a mediocrity who’s usually right whereas Plato is a man of genius who’s always wrong.” Only a genius could have devised Plato’s theory of the forms—the invisible, intangible “ideas” that give shape to every visible, tangible thing. But the theory of forms is always wrong when applied to political thinking, as every experiment in ideal, utopian politics has proved.
[...]
The original design of Microsoft Word, in the early 1980s, was a work of clarifying genius, but it had nothing to do with the way writing gets done. The programmers did not think about writing as a sequence of words set down on a page, but instead dreamed up a new idea about what they called a “document.” This was effectively a Platonic idea: the “form” of a document existed as an intangible ideal, and each tangible book, essay, love letter, or laundry list was a partial, imperfect representation of that intangible idea.

Turkey’s Double Game in Syria
Christopher de Bellaigue
▻http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/oct/14/turkey-double-game-syria

(...)

One might wonder why the Turkish government would risk endangering a peace process with the PKK that has greatly contributed to Turkish stability, improved human rights and the rule of law, and facilitated economic development. The Turks may be calculating that the PKK cannot easily abandon a process that has brought its members new political power in some Kurdish areas and allowed Kurdish nationalist MP back into the national parliament. They also seem to believe that the Kurds are due a sharp reality check as to the impossibility of replicating Syria-style autonomy in Turkey. The ISIS advance on Kobani could serve that purpose, while the contraction of the Kurdish fief pushes the nationalists onto the tender mercies of the Turkish state—as Kobani has demonstrated. Weakened by the defeats suffered by its affiliate in Syria, the PKK may be less able to resist political demands made by the Turkish government if serious negotiations are renewed toward a final settlement.

For the United States, these calculations suggest that getting meaningful Turkish cooperation on ISIS may require a renewed US commitment toward toppling Assad. Responding to pressure from Washington, the Turkish government has agreed to join the US in training “moderate” Syrian fighters on Turkish soil. But the Turks have not approved America’s request to use their base at Incirlik in southern Turkey for US attacks on ISIS. That will only happen, the Turkish prime minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, has insisted, if the US removes its longstanding opposition to Turkish demands for a no-fly zone over northern Syria and for the establishment of secure humanitarian corridors for displaced Syrians close to the border.

As Turkey and the United States negotiate the minutiae of a war they are fighting for different reasons, the wider fate of the Kurds is finely poised. The vile situation in Kobani has become a case study in the ways that civil wars suck in neighbors and break down alliances as the innocent are put to the sword. It is also a powerful refutation of the trite adage that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. In this conflict there are no friends.